New Medias Influence On Politics

Image: Robin Eley

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When one of the wise old birds of British and American print journalism, Sir ­Harold Evans, invited me to Washington for the annual awards dinner for The Week, I never expected to wind up as the filling in a shouting-head sandwich. Yet there I was on an evening in early April, sitting on a stage at the Georgetown Four Seasons between Karl Rove, the Parseltongued Bush adviser, and Doug Schoen, erstwhile Clinton pollster turned Hillary critic.

In our audience sat 200 or so of the usual suspects from my generation of media muckety-mucks: Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, our version of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; ­Andrea Mitchell, by my lights the hardest-working reporter in network television; Bill Kovach, my ex-boss at the New York Times’ Washington bureau and a premier guardian of what we once called journalistic ethics; and Chris Matthews, reeling that evening from having just read an early copy of “that fucking article” about him in the Times Magazine. My wife, Krystyna, seated at the same table, reported that Andrea assured Chris that “it wasn’t that bad,” but no creature in the universe is more fragile than a cable celeb who has just been mugged in print. There were also several representatives from the new media, including Time blogger and former Wonkette Ana Marie Cox, who demanded the microphone to observe that Sir Harry had assembled a panel of aging white guys to discuss an election defined by race and gender.

I found myself perched on a wobbly stool, cold sober, wearing my most expensive Paul Stuart pinstripe and hoping, vainly I fear, that it would armor my dignity against the raucous cabernet-fueled scene in the Four Seasons ballroom. Rove, on my right, and Schoen, on my left, were shouting at each other in a hair-splitting debate over whether Clinton’s “red phone” ads amounted to negative campaigning.

When Rove and Schoen ran out of wind, I had the wit to say into my lapel microphone, “And you wonder why people are disenchanted with politics.” But there was no dodging the fact that the four of us, journalists and strategists alike, were old-timers trying to explain what is potentially a crossroads election for this country­—a zeitgeist election, if you will. The election of Barack Obama would mark a transition from an old politics that deserves to die to a new politics struggling for what could be a risky premature birth. Win or lose, Obama has already, in the words of Fast Company, “taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game from a different generation.” The coexistence of the panelists and our Beltway peers in the audience symbolized nicely the poisoned symbiosis between old politics and old media, the nature of which is summed up in the title of Matthews’ program, Hardball. And what of the blogs and the rest of new media, freighted as they are with the potential to democratize information in a revolutionary way? Alas, they seem for the moment a gigantic, pimpled, teenage version of the old hardball world, with its glorification of prediction as fact, assault as entertainment, and anger as the baseline emotion.

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